


Entoptic

by Alias (anafabula)



Series: you must know where you stop and the world begins [1]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon character deaths, Character Study, Gratuitous metacognition, Horror - Cosmic Horror, Pre-Canon, The Beholding is there, The day Elias’s narration develops something like an attention span is the day I die probably
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-19 11:10:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16533458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anafabula/pseuds/Alias
Summary: The Head of the Magnus Institute will never know death.





	Entoptic

**Author's Note:**

> Some vignettes on seeing.

The Head of the Magnus Institute will never know death. Elias knows this as surely as he knows that he, personally, will someday die. Comfort isn’t an experience germane to the issue, but it does bring him no small amount of satisfaction, and it has for years. He expects this to continue.

They have seen death, of course, in so many human permutations as to become inhuman in variety and dulling scale, at almost every possible distance and level of remove: close enough to breathe in, so far that even the watching was almost too much to ask. They become familiar with death on the individual basis very quickly, as a matter of course; collectively, it is well-understood, well into the foundations of the role. It’s the knowing that much escape each one of them, now and forever, unless something goes horribly wrong beyond the idea of a plan.

Elias doesn’t intend to be the iteration to test the bounds of this more than he’s already had to. But he knows, with significant personal discomfort, that failures never do. He keeps watch accordingly, knowing this, knowing there is hardly another option to be had.

He knew about the issue of death going in, of course. It’s somewhat crucial information as far as comprehending the job offer in the first place. If their post were compatible with the ordinary human fact of death, Wright — long generations past any kind of trial and error before he and Elias ever met — would not have needed him, just as Jackson would not have chosen Wright, and Schuyler never would have looked to Jackson; and so on, with or without deep forethought or justifiable haste, all the long walk backwards to Jonah Magnus, who still lacked a base of reference when they never will again.

Magnus by necessity had a dearth of perspective — to do otherwise would have required he be looking back, from a vantage point no human had achieved at the time — and pushed to absolutes to compensate. Much as he agrees this was the safest option now, with the slight effort of deliberate recall Elias can remember his white-knuckled grip on Miles Rhett’s wrist at the end as the reality of loss came in around the edges of him that had already broken open, and conversely Rhett’s then and eternal shifting resentment at having been forced to watch and suspected of the potential to look away. Elias does not _like_ doing this, and not even the spirit of masochistic inquiry can drive him back to the memory often; there is little more to be known of it. He knows why it was the right thing for both of them to do; why it was a problem; why Elias himself hates to think of it. This Elias _has_ thought over until he was certain he understood. The grace here, such as it is, being that it’s been more than long enough for every needed lesson to have been stripped from the experience before it came into his hands and delivered alongside, definite and neat.

(It’s not that the _existence_ of a limit experience renders him miraculously now-capable of feeling the _memory_ itself. Here as always what Elias does is know. Just that it is difficult and uncomfortable to know something even that close to its own cessation, at crossed purposes and unblinking and sheared far too close to nothingness by it, with negligible return on investment at best, the value already mined out. He has other priorities because he can.)

As such Elias is long past regretting the knowledge that it’s a bad idea to so much as watch each other die, loath as he is to concede to that loss. (Jackson came close, and he joins her and Wright in not knowing whether the sense of her mouth filling with blood was properly her own or Darius Schuyler’s when she finally had to let him go.) There is no good in privacy but it’s not something they can _process_. Bad enough balancing the doubled memory from any period of coexistence — _that_ Elias knows better than any, for the sheer fact that no other one of them had had to deal with two points of overlap before, even if it’s his own damned fault — without attempting to encompass in it understanding of the end of understanding. Rhett survived the attempt, if only by hitting a natural limit in force; Theofania Jackson had better control; Elias, much as he wants to know, much as he _wants_ , has no real, actionable interest in jeopardizing the entire legacy for a few precious seconds of a perfectly ubiquitously available kind of agony.

He will be survived; this is enough.

And it is so tempting to want otherwise, even so, even knowing better; because much of what plagues him now seems to have been hidden in the fissures of nonbeing that so escape him.

It escapes him similarly — slightly, and by definition — for Elias to determine whether knowing the question of what is and isn’t immortality had affected Elias’s decision then, one way or another. He certainly has never had any particular interest in death, but that’s not much of a data point. What he had done is made all the choices that mattered most before he said yes, after all, not that doing so was mere formality (not quite, anyway; he knows he had that freedom, or he would not have been able to want this) but for practical purposes. Elias finds more to analyze in the chain of acts that brought him to the point of being asked than in the question itself. If there was noteworthy selfishness in him at the time it shifts and blurs under any close examination now. Elias didn’t know how to remember things yet, when it happened, and Wright, who did, found himself weighed heavily by the urgently nonspecific deadline of a violent decade and his own mortality, even with what turned out to be years of breathing room.

Much like Wright himself, Elias will someday die. He is aware of this. As a personal flaw, perhaps, the awareness is quiet but almost constant, in the sense of knowing it. Strictly speaking what he feels on the subject is best described as hatred in advance of a personal affront. This line of best fit is, Elias finds when he does — when he did; now he’s dealt with it — try to articulate it and compare, largely consistent with how the rest also have felt. This is to be expected but is also a good sign. Elias’s own gift fundamentally doesn’t extend to comprehension of people who are unlike him, and he lacked natural aptitudes there to start with, and knew this long before the insult that would’ve been having to realize it only once presented with absolute unflinching fact. Describing his own experiences to himself and reading against the record that he is for incongruities of response is largely the best he gets.

He wasn’t taught to do this — the idea feels irrationally insulting — and he knows the process is fairly ubiquitous. Determining that was satisfying in the way of proving something identical to itself is satisfying; all the post they share does entail is communication of memory, and it’s up to fragile human choice to determine who is an appropriate receptor. The result being that, universally, the various Heads of the Magnus Institute have been the same _kind_ of person. (A tautology, really: they are the kind of person who can do this. That is who does it. The real question isn’t the definition, it’s finding another example working one hand in the present and one in the future and effectively blind.) And people fail.

* * *

It should bring him only satisfaction to watch Gertrude succeed, and Elias reminds himself of this. (He should not have to remind himself of this. In having to be reminded he is already at fault, and when he tries to find and press upon the fault lines it’s like his hands skating off glass.) They are on the same side, much more so than Elias and the allies he tolerates far more frequently than he and Gertrude actually, properly speak. This effort (it should not be effort) of will is enough to distract him, almost, and for almost long enough.

Even from here, perhaps for him especially, the Spiral’s workings are a lot to take in, and that need takes precedence over the rest almost enough to stop the other workings of his mind entirely.

Almost.

The Spiral is by no means impossible to watch. Under his sight it is not intractable but the opposite. It is joyfully _seen_ , offering its endless glut of information raw and without nourishment or form or finite meaning. It is not what it is and it is the eternal craving to share both of these things, which are one thing, which could be approximately seven, which has never been, which presses in on his eye sockets insistent and hatefully friendly, impossible to refute.

Perception isn’t Elias’s problem as the island becomes having been extant. The thing that is the yearning to embody Sannikov Land makes no effort, as the part of Elias counting the moments in play gives up entirely on English for that, to do aught but welcome his omnidirectional gaze. The challenge is one of focus. If he blinks and settles his awareness along every available surface there will always be more, and _more_ , simple and legible until they are read and branching and breaking and drawing in further.

Elias has to observe without knowing and remember without adjusting to contain the knowledge and witness and _absorb_ without judgment as he does it and it’s hard, it is harder than even not looking could ever be: to look but not too far. The sick selfish twisting’s many angles give him enough to think about that it’s almost all he does, and that is almost enough.

(He can hardly affect proceedings now, however he handles the watching; that isn’t the point. What matters is that he witness this. It’s its own, separate duty, all but unrelated to the risk Gertrude won’t manage to make it stop in time.)

Outside of his immediate knowledge is whether Gertrude expected Michael to die. Elias feels him stop existing, for the obvious reasons, and he does draw some relief — even watching the island sink and knowing himself to watch and running the early numbers to draw out his own conclusions on where he should be keeping an eye on the fallout and what exactly he now has to live with Peter having seen with the balance of favors owed in his favor — he did draw relief from Michael ceasing to exist, and not ceasing, for instance, to have ever existed, instead.

The island shudders into nothing and Gertrude sets her face blank against the wind heading back and the world, at least, is comprehensible. Even if Elias can still feel the echoes like something’s gotten caught in the bone marrow of his metacarpals as he works to process it all, it is fundamentally calm. He thinks through how the untwisting will be remembered and easily reaches the simple joy of articulating it, finds himself dwelling on that four-dimensional flowchart for that reason alone, expecting no epiphany from the practice. There is enough left to work with and enough of a lull downstairs for him to linger on the checks and balances of favors owed and favors scheduled and boundaries pushed against secondhand enemies; the weight of debt and spite and damage in all directions, pulling him toward trust in the model and in the plan refined until it now can’t not be the least of all inevitable disadvantages.

(He weighs this against the history of his work, and knows the intense bright calm here is his. They all have done the job and enjoyed it as needed, but the ways and forms and thus the places the person finds purchase differ. This, in particular, was always Elias Bouchard. The gift is just what lets him be good at it now and be relevant.)

When Elias was still regularly struck not just by relief or something like worship but by awe at the incredible feat of world enough to hold his attention, unflinching, and never let go, he was grateful: unspeakably so, like breathing or blinking. The overwhelming feeling being a phase doesn’t affect the legitimacy of it, and is more practical besides — he knows this identically to how he knows the ways each of his predecessors remembered how _they_ felt, what story of the transition there became all they remembered — and it is better than growing pains would be as such.

He knows humans are greedy and selfish and ultimately bound to the wrong paradigm for his work. That’s a matter of — necessary — course, but it frustrates nonetheless: the fact that, afflicted with great fortune, all a mind outgrown from a body that hungers and dies cries out is, _More._ The wanting drives him; all he manages is making it not too unwieldy to work with, directing it so that he isn’t making the hopeless effort of working around it; he knows internal contradiction could destroy him, and that means working with the compromise instead.

* * *

As the stock of sacrifices begins to run down and the anticipation of that pattern goes from simple to trivial, Elias takes the time to check in with Gertrude on the subject. And it itches at him like the looseness of something that will be revealed to never have actually been teeth to begin with — that it is perfectly reasonable to have this conversation, and Elias has done nothing in it to offend the Archivist beyond his usual hazards of, apparently, oversight and existence, and there is nothing necessary in the hostility of the result. But there is no way he could now choose to _stop_ it, inevitably as it results from every thing before his time and beyond his sight as much as what he is, what each of them is.

But it would not unmake the Archivist or himself to live in a world they could actually talk about her work in, where bringing up staffing issues isn’t this hideously delicate and hateful dance for no benefit, one where he could get by with being _given_ a sense of her outlook for the coming year without having to function in passive-aggressive euphemism like children or government officials.

It would not unmake the Archivist to be on the same side as him and to be honest about it. Elias thinks and cannot harbor knowing the answer to whether the same could be said about Gertrude Robinson. Holding just the inquiry in his hands is difficult enough; it hasn’t gotten easier and hasn’t gotten better, and he expects it never can. All that happens is the alternative gets worse, faster, and is already manifestly unlivable.

At any rate, she says no: no more assistants, she will handle the work herself — as if Elias ever questioned that.

Sitting in his mouth like an unasked question in conversation or a razor-edged piece of scrap metal, only painless insofar as he doesn’t try to move—

(And Elias is, especially now that he can’t sustain the focus where it’s most needed, even with the weight of dread he’ll have to sooner than not to weigh him down, all saccade: not stillness, not non-mutual secrets, not _this_ , and sinking into his work only goes so far when that work is predicated on supporting a black box he has all but forgotten how to believe in)

— _What_ work, though.

He doesn’t trust his Archivist, and he doesn’t know.

* * *

There are Powers for whom internal discord is a matter of course, but regrettable; some for whom it is of no concern; even those that benefit. The Hunt, in particular, inhabits the last category, eating its own with what Elias is even now capable of finding to be startling, useful alacrity. The Flesh eats what belongs to it as a matter of course; the End is inevitable, and destroys accordingly. Desolation has the dubious, obtuse distinction of destroying, almost immediately, anything that gives the intimation it could be destroyed. The Lonely is… itself; Elias is more than happy to watch that domain’s self-evident paradox cycles of self-destruction as long as he benefits from it. (He can always benefit from it.) He is happy, by definition, so consistently that it’s more of a term of art in actual practice, to watch all of it.

Beholding is not given to turning on Its own. They must try to turn away first. He knows this. He knows this.

He did not know he could be made to apply that knowledge like this. And it hurts, or it is uncomfortable, or it should be impossible: to doubt his Archivist. The Archivist.

After some time the ability to at least know that he does solidifies. It sits in his skull something like a tumor, such that Elias is able to think _around_ it but not _about_ or _with_. There is always another matter of immediate concern; his attention slides off to information he can use as opposed to that which he can’t even really see, in a way that’s grown alien to him when Elias hasn’t not-thought about anything like this since—

Of course he feels that awful searing epiphany he can pin down in retrospect, the first noticing of what eventually resolves. But the Spiral is built on false revelation. Even if the knowledge itself weren’t anathema he’d assume a false positive; the god of lies, second only to that of liars, is useless to him, and Elias knows better than to afford himself distraction. It’s just that those are the seams through which the doubt winds in.

She does her duty, more or less, she does enough of it. Elias thinks about their common enemies made to suffer and barely has to steer her accordingly; that much is appropriate, is correct. (It’s as close to treading the line between subsistence and starvation as what Gertrude does to herself: they should not, cannot, be at odds in terms of interests enough for enemies in common to be in question.) If the Eye allows what she does then it must offset the pace at which she isn’t reading, the grim knowledge that she’s now been stockpiling privacy for over a decade. (He knows this work should not require faith.)

Handed Kilbride she does not hesitate, and he is and isn’t satisfied: at least she does not want for the willingness to sacrifice what is needed. (At _least._ ) And in this she continues to do the right thing, even once he can’t afford her the artificial distance of throwing those who aren’t her own into the fire; literally, even, once. If anything, she takes the loss of those she lives and works with harder but orchestrates their ends more easily.

Elias watches, and he works, and he tolerates the flashes of careful hostility that are her real personality, imperfectly guarded as it is from him. He watches her lie without lying.

He watches and allows her that secrecy, alone, when she leaves, and then _not_ alone, in the tunnels below he cannot quite own. And when he finds himself trying to believe there is a reason, he bites down until the blood in his mouth can clear his head and remembers what he is: he does not believe, he _knows_. (He certainly does not _try_.)

But the Eye allows it. She reads less and the Eye allows it. She hides and dissembles and the Eye _allows_ it.

Of course It follows her everywhere. Of course for Elias to do Its seeing is his preference, not a necessity on Its part and even less a right on his own. Of course.

He thinks, for days on end, that he must just be disorientated merely as a result of forcing himself to witness the Spiral’s closed, close brush with apotheosis in so much granular detail as to border on inaccuracy. He thinks of how to apply what it’s taught him going forward; liars can be _known_ , and all else is simple, but even the existence of it that he does not know is an insult to his god and an inherent threat. And the fiscal year ends and that takes precedence, the necessity of obfuscating how much it costs to send Gertrude anywhere that can’t be paid in more arcane favors growing more difficult for him to refine until mundane every year.

(And the Spiral recuperates faster than he’d expected, but badly; in watching he knows it thrills, of course, at its lying having an audience. It takes no effort to grant it no quarter. It also takes no effort to tell Gertrude absolutely none of this, it turns out. Elias doesn’t want to, and the Eye lets him. It lets him. Knowing this, too, resists analysis; so he waits.)

He waits, and he enables her as best she lets him even as he has to watch her try to starve their god or starve herself or somehow stave It off from herself; he thinks more often than he’d prefer about the narrow gap between his own need for a living record and the Eye’s opportunistic use of them, a single unbridgeable step and an infinite screaming fall. The Eye doesn’t need what Elias is for, but It can benefit; he is not necessary — he is very far from an Archivist — and this doesn’t trouble him when he lives to be useful.

Elias works, and there is always more to be done, and part of him can tell the ceaseless motion is suspect but he finds no purchase against the yawning question below him where there should be a foundation. But he has and wants no other option, save perhaps an idea of what to _do_.

Then he stops.

And he knows.


End file.
